during my sabbatical that wasn’t really a sabbatical (i went to grad school and gave myself more work), i took a course called playwriting: ritual practice and curious worlds from professor phillip howze. much like how my time off wasn’t really time off, the class itself wasn’t truly about playwriting.
it was about creative form. stagework was the medium, but professor howze was much more concerned about how to sustain the curiosity and fluidity necessary to make art.
the word ‘ritual’ paints a picture of what the class entailed: exercises in how to become comfortable enough to follow our instincts and step outside of our comfort zones, workshops groups on how to meaningfully engage with someone else’s creations, and exposure to works that may not necessarily fall within the mainstream.
i went to harvard for theology (philosophy with storytelling), but under the direction of that singular course, i started the slow work of repairing my relationship with my creative process.
the first day of class, professor howze made an off-the-cuff comment about not writing on final draft (the screenwriting software used across the industry), describing the program as ‘soulless’ and ‘capitalistic.’ prior to arriving at cambridge, i was in the midst of a years long writer’s rut: day in and out of my los angeles apartment, maru coffee, soho house, anywhere with seating, staring at the 12 point courier font that read: by SARA JIN LI.
and nothing else. for the better part of two years, i had a metaphoric stare-off with final draft. it was fruitless and i lost.
one of the first lessons of professor howze’s course is about how to break rules: constructs that tell us this is how it’s supposed to be. my whole life, i’ve been a subpar rule follower. i love the idea of rules, but i lack the obedience to follow them. i love the idea of a ‘how to’ be a Real Working Artist, but the tools given to me never fit quite right.
when i deleted final draft, i started writing again.
over the last eight months, my artistic process has become a mess. but it’s chaos that feels intentional. i purposefully do not allow myself to format while writing. i write my stories through a stream of consciousness. i don’t use quotation marks, headings, or even capitalization. in freeing myself from the structures that we’re told is foundational for text, i was able to access the actual creation itself.
most of my ideas are still unknown, even to myself: i do not know, ever, what the story is going to be until i finish writing it. but the curiosity and playfulness and uncertainty required to chip away at raw material (a blank page) to find the substance underneath demands a certain kind of freefall from formula.
writing in lowercase has been especially restorative. there’s not a shortage of think pieces on how gen z writes in lowercase by default—and how it’s unprofessional, childish, and lazy. i’ve been working since i was 14 (my first writing job was an internship at a local business magazine; i lied about my age when i submitted my samples) and i often think about how form, both the grammatical and physical, is another hoop for young people to jump through.
author bell hooks famously did not capitalize her name because she wanted to shift focus from her identity to her ideas. i wrote the entirety of my master’s thesis in lowercase. if the content is strong, then the packaging of it is just secondary—if relevant at all. i reverted my type style to all lowercase for gut feelings and started publishing again. short of request, i may never format any of my creative works to what is supposed to be ‘correct’ again.
(at least not in this pivotal part of my process, when the work is for me and me alone.)
on the other side of it, seeing my ideas in lowercase—without the dressing of “EXT/V.O/INT/ETC’—allows me to see what it is. ernest hemingway famously said(ish), “write drunk, edit sober.” i write irresponsibly (but not carelessly) until there is something to polish. one of the universal rules of writing is not to edit while you write and when i removed all the elements of format and type, i found myself less distracted by presentation.
i am a lowercase truther, but above all, i’m a proponent for breaking something when it’s not working. some processes can’t be repaired nor should they. final draft was never going to be my friend. but in the aftermath of deconstructing anything (relatedly, this is one of the core tenants of abolition), something better can be built in its wake.
and whatever that is, however it looks, it's waiting for you.
I truly couldn’t have loved this more, reading it felt like an exhale and a heart flutter of recognition